Archaeology has a representation problem. For most of the time that scholars have been probing the human past, they have focused mainly on the activities of men to the exclusion of women. There are a couple reasons for this bias. One is that the kinds of artifacts that tend to preserve well are made of inorganic materials such as stone or metal, and many are associated with behaviors stereotypically linked to men, such as hunting.
Hayeur Smith grew up surrounded by fabrics her anthropologist mother collected from around the world. In her 20s Hayeur Smith earned a fashion degree in Paris. She knew that the way people in the past clothed themselves and wove everything from currency to cloaks could reveal a great deal about a lost culture, especially its women. In the 1990s, as a Ph.D.
Until Hayeur Smith began her work, the real lives of Viking women were largely unknown to science. According to archaeologist Douglas Bolender of the University of Massachusetts Boston, who studies the Viking Age and the medieval North Atlantic, the basic outline of Viking society came from the Icelandic sagas. Those book-length narrative accounts were set down more than 300 years after the events they describe.
Alexandra Sanmark of the University of the Highlands and Islands in Perth, Scotland, an authority on Vikings and medieval archaeology, agrees. A man buried with scales is seen as a merchant, she says, but a woman buried with scales must be a merchant's wife, despite ample evidence that women conducted trade.
Hayeur Smith demonstrated the Vikings' style of weaving at an event organized by the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown in 2020, a recording of which is available on YouTube. A wood horizontal bar resting on two vertical ones holds the separate vertical warp threads, which are weighed down taut by volcanic stones of the kind that dot the shores of Iceland.
Somewhere between the first and second year of this endless and “filthy” job, soil all over her fingers, Hayeur Smith had her eureka moment. “Look,” she shows me on a video call, holding her book open to a graph and pointing to a thick cluster of circled icons. “The more sites I checked, the more I saw this pattern. Viking Age textiles were colorful and varied, but in medieval times, there is a complete shift into standardized cloth.
It's a modern idea that work done at home is “domestic” and lesser because it doesn't produce money, Moen says. In the North Atlantic world, “home was where work was done.” In fact, as Hayeur Smith points out, vaðmál was a major income-generating product.
I've been saying this Greta was pissed.
Or ships
Not to mention having babies (only women can do that).
Many women of today could emulate their work ethic……and work
I believe it. But what's the big deal? Haven't women all over the world done, pretty much, the same thing? If not more?
And the Vikings were black 😤
... and there were female Viking warriors.
AnitaRadini Without weaving, would Hsap ever have moved north from the Mediterranean world?
AnitaRadini you might find this an interesting article
Yeah and mens wouldn't exist without womens birthing them... You don't say?
But I thought the sex binary was invented in the 18th century as a way to ensure racial and gendered oppression. Are you saying there was a clear category called “women” this early on? What about Vikings who identified as non-binary?
barefootboomer This article fails to detail which women were doing the weaving. It was slave labor. The way the Vikings in Iceland were weaving changed; they started using Irish styles (Z/S, not Z/Z). Weaving 1 sail, took 1.5 to 2 person years of labor to manufacture, it wasn't domestic work
Be Iranian women voice. Have a look at Mahsa_Amini
Don’t forget the animals used to spin their wools and value in sail making.
“Lies, tears and spinning are the things God gives by nature to a woman while she lives.” The Wife of Bath - Canterbury Tales - Chaucer So little was expected of women, and any natural talent was stamped out.
Vikings regarded women very highly because of their magical ability to create life. How about we be more like vikings
They left that out of the Northman (2022).
Imagine an interesting and insightful article about Viking weaving minus the whining.
Thank you for your help to invaders.
Viking women did a lot more than weave clothing.
Or perhaps they were well taken care of.
Putting a feminist spin on the past. Good business. Still B.S.
Maybe some of todays women could take note and up their work ethic a bit.
We put them in their place.
Before re-inventing history, it may be wise to read the entrails of an owl or two for confirmation of somebody's discarded throw rug.
Fascinating article, however I will put it out there that if the Vikings were no longer raiding when textiles came to prominence, were they really Vikings anymore? Not really, they were, 'North Atlantic Textile Traders,' for a few centuries it seems, weren't they?
Just see what great doors women open, when they reach total & complete equality! Hold on to your hats!
vpostrel, check it out.
not if those women identified as man. trustscience empath
So was Vikings society and medieval era a matriarchy?
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